I’m not sure what you mean by cost-effective resources, are you wondering what things are worth investing into inside of a total budget versus which things you could be more frugal on? Overall I would say there’s not a big difference in terms of what to consider differently from running Windows: Linux will benefit just as much from good hardware (maybe more?) as window as will.

If you want to do plex and utilize hardware video transcoding you’ll probably want an Nvidia GPU but I’ve had better experiences with AMD graphics cards in Linux. The best home management tool I can recommend is home assistant, and it doesn’t have particularly high system requirements, you can run it on a raspberry pi.

I would love a suggestion for a ups that could tolerate running off my generator when the power is out for extended periods, anyone have a decently priced recommendation?

Yeah, I have one of those and love it. I use it between PC, SteamDeck and Switch all the time

I use cloud flare DNS and it has support for dynamic IPs, my current setup is through a plug-in in my PFSense router

I want to preface this by saying that I really don’t know anything about Lemmy, but I can see where subscriptions are managed by the subscribers servers in a federated situation: the community’s server might not even know who is subscribed to it since the subscribers server might be responsible for pulling data.

But any individual subscribers server would know about other users on that server that are subscribed to that community

Paperless-ng (or ngx, but I don’t run that flavor)